


All This Time

by JRW9699



Series: Solid State [1]
Category: Arrow (TV 2012), Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Angst, Blood and Gore, Dark Kara Danvers, Eventual Smut, F/F, F/M, M/M, Slow Burn, Swearing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-21
Updated: 2019-03-09
Packaged: 2019-11-01 14:21:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 13,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17868905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JRW9699/pseuds/JRW9699
Summary: Kara Zor-El, Legionnaire turned mercenary, is brought back to life on the planet Earth, the oldest of the civilised worlds. Forced into a contract under Lionel Luthor, Kara must solve a murder which the SCPD have ruled a closed case. The Kryptonian must wade through hordes of violent killers, in settings ranging from virtual paradises to seedy houses of prostitution, all the while trailed by the elusive Green Arrow.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon, this one is cyber-punk through and through guys. Gore, violence, swearing, sex, and death right from the beginning, most certainly not for the feint hearted. Mostly I couldn't get this out of my head until I started writing it, so...yeah. Not sure if i'll keep this up any time soon, depends on the relationship my brain and I have over the next few weeks.

Coming back from the dead, to quote J’onn J’onzz, is a bitch. Every single time. The closest likeness to it that Kara could describe was the sensation of being dragged backwards through a bramble bush, underwater, while getting throat-fucked, and your lungs are filled with jello. In a word, it sucked.

In the Legion they taught people to let go before they were put into storage. To stick it in neutral and float. It was the first thing they would drill into the new recruits from day one, the hard-eyed J’onzz pacing in front of them in the induction space. ‘ _Don’t worry’_ he would tell them, Kara remembered his voice vividly, ‘ _you’ll be ready for_ it’. Failing that, the fear of death was carved from them with the words ‘ _don’t worry, kid. They’ll store it_ ’

 _Don’t worry, they’ll store it_. It was a doubled-edged piece of wisdom. Both a bleak condemnation of the efficiency of the system the Legion had stood against, and a clue to the ever-elusive mental state required to navigate the harsh waters of re-sleeving. Whatever you are, whatever you feel, whatever you’re thinking when they store you, that’s what you’ll be when you come out. So, the best thing to do is let go. Stick it in neutral. Disengage and float.

If they give you the time.

Kara came up thrashing. A violent cough forcing a glob of the amniotic storage fluid from her lungs, one hand plastered across her chest searching for the wounds, the other clutching at a weapon that was no longer there. A strong hand on her shoulder caused Kara to lash out, the hand that had been searching for wounds shooting to the throat of the person who had gripped her without thought. Rolling the rest of the way out of the floatation gel, Kara struck out, free hand striking her assailant in the nose and then the gut within but a second, and the man (so she assumed) dropped to the floor. 

She stayed on him, sunk to the floor, crouched over him with her left hand still curled tightly around his throat. A fizzle and a jumble of voices sounded from behind her, snapping Kara back into reality a little. Raking her free hand through her hair to clear her view, Kara felt globs of the floatation gel run between her fingers, slicking back her hair like oil. Brining her hand back down, vision finally clear for the lack of hair and gel, Kara dimly registered her lack of clothing before turning to the rest of the room.

“Who the fuck is she?” One of the voices questioned, Kara couldn’t tell which because of the surgical masks.

“I don’t know!” Kara assumes it’s the one holding the tablet who replies. “It’s all fucking redacted!”

Beyond the two lab technicians still retreating away from her slowly, Kara noticed another figure, presumably security going from the cattle prod in his hand. Throwing him the most threatening glare she could muster, which required far more effort than she would have hoped for, Kara watched with a wicked grin as the security guard takes a few steps backwards. None of those three occupants of the room moved following that, and for half a minute Kara stayed in place, panting heavily, trying to adjust to her surroundings, and doing her best to figure out why it felt like she weighed so much.

“Miss Zor-El calm down.” One of the technicians finally spoke.

That was when it clicked for her. Back on Krypton, Zor-El was a fairly common surname, her ancestors had been among the original settlers and so many had taken the same name as a mark of respect. Everyone knew how to pronounce it. That technician most certainly didn’t, he spoke the same kind of Amanglic that was spoken on Krypton, but with none of the lilt or poetry, his voice was much harder, more drawl like. Still he had butchered the pronunciation, it had sounded more like ‘Zo-Ral’ from him.

Add to that she still felt too heavy.

Then the realisation crashed through her blurred perception like a brick through frosted glass.

Offworld.

Somewhere along the line they had taken Kara Zor-El (d.h.) and shipped her…somewhere. Krypton, to Kara’s knowledge, was the only habitable planet in the Corvus star system, which meant a long range needlecast download to somewhere too far away from home.

Ignoring the words of the technician Kara looked around, beginning to process her situation, she needed to figure out where she was. The room looked to her exactly how old-world prisons had been described to her. Dull grey concrete walls, harsh neon lighting tubes overhead, and a large steel door was set into the wall on the far side. The re-sleeving facilities on Krypton were so much more glamorous, Kara had seen them more than a few times, pastel colours, pretty faces, rooms with thermostats set perfectly. After all, being re-sleeved meant that one had paid their debt to society, Kara reasoned, shouldn’t they be sent off with a fresh start and a sunny disposition?

“How…” Kara tried, new vocal cords were always a challenge, and clearly the ones the belonged to her new sleeve hadn’t been used for a while. “How long? How long have I been down?”

The technician with the tablet began scrolling through the files again before she looked back up to Kara. “A hundred and fifty years.”

_A hundred and fifty?_

Kara vaguely registered the sound of choking, she was clearly applying too much pressure to the throat of the man she had pinned down, but she ignored it. The information was a little difficult to process, there had been no trial, no forewarning of how long she would be down for, a hundred and fifty was a little too long to process, even for her. With the weight of that revelation pressing upon her, Kara leaned back and took her hand from the throat of the man beneath her, moving slowly backwards until her back pressed against the base of the storage tank she had escaped from. Taking a shallow breath in, Kara reached up, blocked one nostril and blew tank fluid out through the other.

“Fucking hate getting shot.” She mumbled to herself before looking up and addressing the technicians. “Wanna tell me where I am? Itemize my rights or something?”

“Right now, you don’t have any rights.”

_Asshole._

It was the guard that had spoken, a grim smile stitched across his face. Kara briefly rolled her stiff neck and snorted the other nostril clean.

“Want to tell me where I am?”

The guard hesitated for a moment, glanced up at the roof as if to ascertain the information for himself before passing it on, then looked back to Kara. “Sure. Why not? Iron Heights Penitentiary, Starling City.”

“What planet genius?” Kara spoke sharply, throwing him another glare.

“Earth.”

_XXX_

A doctor finally took Kara away from the re-sleeving facility, leading her down a long white corridor, the floor covered in scuff marks from what Kara assumed were the rubber wheels of gurneys. The doctor was moving a quite the pace, and Kara struggled to keep up with her, wrapped as she was in a thin grey towel and still dripping with tank fluid. Everything about the doctor’s manner was superficially bedside, Kara noted, though there stood a harried undercurrent to it. She had a sheaf of hardcopy documents under one arm and she was clearly in a rush. Kara didn’t even want to consider how many re-sleevings she had to oversee in a single day.

“You should get as much rest as you can in the next day or two,” She recited. “There might be minor aches and pains, tremors, visual or auditory hallucinations, it’s all normal. Sleep should resolve any issues. If you have any recurring comp…”

“I know.” Kara cut over her. “I’ve done this before.”

Finally, the two came to a stop at a side door with the word _shower_ stencilled into frosted glass. The doctor steered Kara inside and paused for a moment, as if to study her.

“I’ve used showers before too.” Kara threw her a condescending smirk.

The doctor simply nodded. “When you’re finished, there’s an elevator at the end of the hall, discharge is on the next floor. Don’t uh…leave in a hurry, the warden wants to see you.”  

To the best of her knowledge, Kara was sure the ‘manual’ said to avoid any string mental shocks to the newly re-sleeved. This doctor didn’t seem to care much for that, though given the stack of papers under her arm, Kara deduced that she must have read her file, or at least, whatever was available, and assumed she could handle it. Kara did her best to do just that.

“What does he want?”

“He didn’t choose to share that with me.” Her words had an edge of frustration that she shouldn’t have allowed to show. “Perhaps your reputation precedes you.”

“Perhaps.” Kara smirked. On an impulse, she flexed her new face into a warm, disarming smile. “Doctor, I’ve never been here before. To Earth. I’ve never dealt with your police, should I be worried?”

The doctor looked at Kara intently, and behind her eyes Kara could see both fear and curiosity, perhaps her reputation really did precede her.

“With a woman like you,” She managed finally. “I would’ve thought they’d be the worried ones.”

“Yeah, right.”

With a smile and a curt nod, the doctor retreated, the frosted door sliding shut behind her. Quickly ditching the towel and stepping into the shower, Kara whistled away her disquiet tunefully, doing her best not to slip into a song from her home, just in case they were listening. With careful, almost surgical movements, Kara ran soap and hands along her new body, finally taking the time to get to know it. Her sleeve was in her late twenties, possibly early thirties, Protectorate standard, with a fighter’s build. She could feel a tugging at the edges of her senses, the sensation was, she reasoned, a military custom carved onto her nervous system. Neurachemical upgrade, pretty advanced too, Kara quickly discovered. It had been the reason, she realised as she tested the muscle response under the wet heat of the shower, that she had been able to drop the technician without a problem but still had difficulty breathing. There was hardwired training in her new sleeve, not just the neurachem but combat conditioning and reflex aggression. Kara had attacked the technician because her sleeve _remembered_ how to attack.

“Cool.” Kara hummed out aloud.

Still, it paled in comparison to what she was used to, but that hardly came as a surprise. The Legion’s neurachem was centuries beyond anything that existed on the open or black market, even CTAC R&D were lightyears behind. Then again, Kara supposed, she had been on the stack for almost two centuries, maybe things had changed.

Turning back to her new sleeve, Kara continued her evaluation. There was a tightness in her chest that signalled something deeper than adjustment issues, it felt like a nicotine addiction. Rolling her eyes, the Kryptonian huffed unceremoniously, she’d only just managed to kick the cigarettes before she’d hit the stack, having to do it again was a daunting prospect. There was also a considerable amount of scarring across her torso and forearms, and Kara took the time to run a finger along each and every one of them. Every sleeve has a history, she had learnt that early on, and if that kind of thing was an issue well…that’s why synthetics were such a big market. Kara shuddered a little at that, she always had hated synthetic sleeves. Back in the day she had likened it to a draughty house, the nerve endings never seemed sensitive enough and everything tasted like curried sawdust.

Stepping from the shower into the changing cubicle, Kara found a neatly folded white blouse and grey pants that looked suited to summer, yet somewhat professional at the same time. On top of the pile of clothes was a simple steel watch and a pair of stud-like earrings. Taking a deep breath Kara turned to face the mirror.

It was always difficult, seeing a new face, looking into the glass and seeing a total stranger staring back. During her training, J’onn had likened it to pulling an image from the depths of a stereogram. Not that J’onn ever actually understood what they had to go through. _Lucky bastard._ Not even the Legionnaires, despite their frankly god-like training, were wholly used to it, the feeling that couldn’t be shaken, that the face in the mirror wasn’t your own but someone else through a window.

Kara stood before the mirror and idly towelled herself dry, getting used to the face. It was Caucasian, which was a comfortable lack of change, nothing drastic, and the overwhelming impression Kara got was that if there was ever a line of least resistance in life, her new face had never been along it. Even with the characteristic pallor of a long stay in the tank, the features of her face managed to look weather-beaten. The hair was blonde too, though shorter than hers had been, and the eyes were a deep blue. All in all, Kara summarised, she still looked remarkably more like her birth sleeve than she had any right to given the mass jump in time and location.

Finally, suitably dry and as accustomed as she could hope to be with her new body after less than an hour out of the tank, Kara turned and got dressed. With a final glance at the mirror, she slipped in the earrings, strapped on the new watch and went out to meet the warden.

It was four-fifteen, local time.


	2. Chapter 2

There had been guards waiting for her the moment she had stepped out of the shower. Kara really shouldn’t have been surprised, if anyone would have had access to her files, it was the warden, and from the show of force, he was afraid of her. The guards had been wholly silent as they escorted her to the warden’s office, and all four of them remained just outside the double doors she was sent through.

The office spoke volumes. The windows were blacked out, letting only dim streams of grey light through them, and there were no artificial lights that she could see. Beyond that the room held an air of faux-intellectualism, aged oak panelling made up the walls, shelves of books everywhere but all coated in a layer of dust, stacks of paper work clearly left unattended filled most all of the available space. Clearly, he was not a man who existed beyond his job. The warden himself was a thin, severe-looking man, suited in black, sat behind a superficially grandiose desk.

The warden didn’t look up from his tablet as Kara took measured steps towards his desk, simply waving a hand towards the empty chair that sat in front of her. With a reluctant sigh, Kara took the seat, not seeing much point in rebelling. Even once she was sat, the man continued to ignore her presence, as if she was beneath him.

“I’m warden David Singh, chief executive for Iron Heights. And you…” The warden began finally looking up at her for a brief moment, and in his eyes, Kara saw the same mixture of emotions that the doctor had hit her with downstairs. “File’s incomplete, parts of it sealed. What is here?” The warden paused for a second, beginning to scroll through what Kara was forced to assume was her own file. “Espionage, terrorism, crimes against the state, and more murders than I care to count. And when they finally arrested you, you gunned down your own partner in the stack. Report says he was shot from behind, so…along with everything else, you’re a coward.”

Kara’s head dropped as the warden paused again. It wasn’t shame she felt, that report was fabricated and she knew it, it was anger that began to boil in her veins. With the shock of re-sleeving, the trauma of her death, the information overload since she had arrived on Earth, she had almost forgotten about Jimmy. Hearing the warden accuse her of being the one to kill him, and with such cowardice…it took almost all of her willpower not to leap across the table and throttle him there and then.

“Don’t you have anything to say?” The warden pushed after a second of silence.

“Oh, I’m-I’m sorry, I was waiting for a question.” Kara began with a smirk. “It was all monologue there for a while, so I kinda tuned out.”

With a disgruntled glare, the warden slid a hardcopy document across the desk to her.

“Kara Zor-El,” He began, mispronouncing her name with the same skill as his minion in the tank room. “This is a document certifying that your D.H.F. was shipped from the Kryptonian Justice Administration, received here intact, and sleeved in this body. Witnessed by myself, and closed-circuit monitors. A disc copy of the transmission details and tank data are enclosed. Please sign here.”

Kara took a pen from the desk and wrote her name in someone else’s handwriting next to the warden’s finger. Singh separated the top and bottom copies, and handed Kara the pink one. As Singh tidied away his paperwork Kara glanced up and search in vain for any sign of the cameras.

Seemingly satisfied with the hardcopy, Singh turned back to her. “You have also been provided with clothing and incidentals as per the specification of Luthor Corp. which had leased you. As such you are the property of Lionel Luthor for the duration of that lease.”

“Property? What about my rights?” Kara spoke quickly.

Singh seemingly ignored her, and Kara couldn’t help but to think back to the words of the grunt in the tank room. _You don’t have any rights._

“Failure to comply with the terms of this parole will result in your immediate de-sleeving, and return here, to serve out the rest of your sentence, which…does not appear to have an end date”

Kara remained silent, allowing Singh to continue his monologue. “You’re going to screw this up. Do something violent, hurt someone, kill someone. I know people like you.”

“There are no people like me.” Kara answered, steeling her expression. _Not anymore._

“Well then,” Singh seemed to have lost a bit of his iron. “You’re a lucky women, Zor-El. Don’t waste the opportunity.”

The only thing Kara could think as she stood and turned to leave was; _don’t they ever get tired of saying it?_

The paper copy of her parole document was neatly folded and slid into a pocket. Without so much as a glance back towards the warden, Kara headed back out through the doors. No soon as Kara had made it through them and back into the reception space, she noticed the doctor waiting for her. On seeing Kara, she took a step forward and held out a small white card.

“Miss Zor-El.”

Kara paused.

“There shouldn’t be any major problems with adjusting,” She said. “This is a healthy body, and you are used to this. If there is anything major, call this number.”

Kara put out and are and lifted the little rectangle of card with a machined precision that she hadn’t noticed before. The Neurachem was kicking in. Her hand delivered the card to the same pocket as the paperwork and she was gone, crossing the rest of the reception and pushing open the door that lead to the main exit without a word. Kara knew it was a little ungracious, but she was firm in the belief that no one in that prison had earned her gratitude.

Singh’s words washed around her mind. _You’re a lucky woman_. Sure, Kara thought, a hundred and eighty lightyears from her home, wearing another woman’s body, and on a rental agreement to some corporate asshole she’d never heard of, freighted in to do a job that she hadn’t even been briefed on. Fail and return to storage. Kara felt so lucky she could have burst into song as she walked out the door.


	3. Chapter 3

The entrance hall was huge, and all but deserted. It looked, Kara thought, like nothing more than the Vathlo rail terminal back on Krypton. Beneath a tiled roof of long transparent panels, the fused glass paving of the floor shone amber in the afternoon sun. A couple of children were playing with the automatic doors at the exit, and there was a solitary cleaning robot sniffing along the shade at one wall. Nothing else moved. Marooned in the glow on benches of old wood a scattering of humanity waited in silence for friends or family to ride in from their altered carbon exiles.

Download central.

These people, Kara knew, wouldn’t recognise their loved ones in their new sleeves; recognition would be left to the homecomers, and for those who awaited them the anticipation of reunion would be tempered with a cool dread at what face or body they might have to learn to love. Or maybe they were a few generations down the line, waiting for relatives who were no more to them now than a vague childhood memory or a family legend.

There was one family Kara noticed as she walked through the hall. A couple who were joined by a middle-aged woman, a woman who called them ‘ _mommy’_ and ‘ _daddy’_. ‘ _She was a seven-year-old girl_ ’, she heard the father shout. The clinical detachment of the doctor who had returned the girl was something Kara almost respected in a twisted way.

“Quentin Lance.” Kara was suddenly accosted by an older looking man. “I’ll be driving you to the Luthor residence.”

Something about the man made Kara think she should know him, there was an odd familiarity to his features which she couldn’t quite place. _Altered Carbon_. She had ridden so many sleeves, worn so many faces that weren’t her own, see so many more. Perhaps déjà vu was simply to be expected after living a life bouncing from form to form. Her driver was a man in his late forties. Under the ink-black discs of his shades, he wore sharp cheekbones and a wide slash of a mouth that was set in a dry line. The sunglasses were jammed on a wide nose. His head almost cleanly void of hair in a way that suggested a life lived with stress. He had wrapped himself in a sharp suit, reminiscent of something from the old world, and not at all similar to the grandiose of Kryptonian attire.

“They put a kid in that old lady?”

Lance offered her a tight, grim smile as they began to walk. “Victim restitution. The state just gives you what they have on hand, and it’s always the broken-down crap like that. The prisons lease out the, uh…good sleeves,” Lance made a vague gesture to the body Kara was wearing. “For a profit.”

“Very humane.”

“Huh, that’s underselling it.”

“They don’t have that where I come from.”

“And where would that be?”

Lance timed his question just as he and Kara stepped through the exit, and the warmth of the sunlight hit her in the face. Kara screwed up her new eyes against the glare and made out angular buildings behind real wire fences on the other side of a badly kept landing lot. Sterile, and off-white, quite possibly original pre-millennial structures. Between the oddly monochrome walls, Kara could see sections of a grey iron bridge that came vaulting in to land somewhere hidden from view. A similarly drab collection of sky and ground cruisers sat about in not-particularly neat lines. The wind gusted abruptly, and Kara caught the faint odour of some flowering weed growing along the cracks in the landing lot. In the distance was the hum of traffic.

“…and I tell you there is only one judge! Do not believe the men of science when they tell you…”

The squawk of a poorly operated amp-box hit them as they went down the steps from the exit. Kara glanced across the landing lot and saw the crowd assembled around a black-clad man on a packing crate. Holographic placards wove erratically in the air above the heads of the listeners. NO TO RESILUTION 653!! ONLY GOD CAN RESURECT! D.H.F. = D.E.A.T.H. Cheers drowned out the speakers.

“What’s this?”

“Catholic,” Lance answered, his lips curling into a grimace. “Old time religious sect.”

“Never heard of them.”

“They don’t believe you can digitise a human being without losing the soul.”

“Not a widespread faith then.”

“Just on Earth,” He said sourly. “I think the Vatican – that’s the head church – financed a couple of those cryoships to Starhaven and Latimer…”

“I’ve been to Starhaven, I never ran into anything like this.”

Lance simply scoffed. “The ships only left at the turn of the century, they won’t get there for a couple more decades yet.”

They skirted the gathering, and a young woman with her hair pulled severely back thrust a leaflet at Kara. The gesture was so abrupt that it tripped her sleeve’s unsettled reflexes and Kara made a blocking motion before she got it under control. Hard-eyed, the woman stood with the leaflet out and Kara took it with a placating smile.

“You will not be forgiven.”

“Come on, let’s go.” Lance was steering her away, one hand on her arm, in a manner that suggested a lot of practice. Kara shook him off politely but equally firmly.

“We in a hurry?”

“I think we both have better things to do.” He said, tight-lipped, glancing back to where others were being accosted by the crowd.

“I might have wanted to talk to her.”

“Looked like you wanted to take her head off.” Lance snarked back.

“That’s just this sleeve. I think it had some neurachem conditioning way back when, and she tripped it. Most people do get to lie down for a few hours after downloading. I’m a little on edge.”

The lift turned out to be a rather rakish-looking Lockhead-Mitoma limousine decked out in a shiny chrome. The hatch into the belly of the cruiser was quickly hinged up by Lance, and it was pulled shut equally as quickly as they both clambered into their seats. Lance immediately moved for the pilot’s chair and set the cruiser in motion. Kara steadied herself against the lift if the cruiser and found her way to a window seat. As they spiralled up, Kara craned her neck to keep the crowd below in sight. The transport straightened out about a hundred meters up and dropped its nose slightly, Kara sank back into the arms of the automould and looked down to the leaflet still in her hands.

CAN A MACHINE SAVE YOUR SOUL? It demanded rhetorically. The word ‘machine’ had been printed in script designed to resemble an archaic computer display. ‘Soul’ was in flowering stereographic letters that danced all over the page. Kara turned over for the answer.

NO!!!!

“So cryogenic suspension is okay, but digitised human freight isn’t? Interesting.” Kara looked back at the glowing digital of the leaflet after catching Lance’s curious look in the rear-view mirror.

“Yeah, spirt savers and after lifers. 653 fails and they still won’t shut up.”

“What’s 653?” Kara questioned, there has been reference to it all over the placards.

“It was a test case that went trough the UN Court.” Lance answered. “Star City prosecutors office wanted to subpoena a Catholic murder victim who’s in storage.”

“Why wouldn’t you spin someone up if they’re witness to their own murder?”

“Archdiocese says you only get the sleeve you’re born with. They spin you up for anything, even to testify to murder, then you go to hell.” There was something muttered by Lance that Kara couldn’t quite make out, but she could be sure that it wasn’t pleasant.

“I see. So, your opinion of them isn’t a generous one.”

Lance almost turned to face her. “I hate those freaks. They’ve been grinding us down for the best part of two and a half thousand years. They’ve been responsible for more misery than any other organisation in history. You know they don’t even let their adherents practice birth control? And they’ve stood against every significant medical advance of the last five centuries. The only thing that can be aid in their favour is that D.H.F. has mostly stranded them here on Earth.”

“Answer me a question?”

“If I can.”

“Well, if these guys don’t practice birth control, there’s gotta be a lot of them, right? And it’s not like Earth has been a hub of activity for the last few centuries, so…how come they aren’t running things?”

Lance simply shot her an unpleasant smile. “Storage.”

Kara tapped her hand against the back of her neck, before stopping to wonder if the gesture was in use on Earth. It was the universal site for a cortical stack, but cultural quirks don’t always work like that.

“Storage, of course.” From the look on Lance’s face, the gesture did translate. “There’s no special exemption for them?”

“Nope,” Lance smirked. “ten years or three months, it’s all the same to them. Death sentence every time. They never come off the stack. Cute, huh?”

Kara didn’t answer, it didn’t need answering to her. Outside of the window, the monochrome of the city washed by. Metal and concrete and neon blurring together in a cacophony of silence as the pattering of rain against glass filled the air.

“So, what were you in for?” Lance broke the silence again.

“You know, little bit of this, little bit of that.” Kara answered vaguely, still looking out the window. “Blew some shit up and killed some people.” Lance met her eyes in the mirror. “Some people just need killing.”

“Oh yeah? And how do you decide who deserves to die?”

“Depends on the day. Anything can set me off. Interstellar dictatorship, genocide, people who ask too many personal questions.” Lance smirked at her. “Right now, I’m feeling pretty hostile towards Lionel Luthor. Whoever the fuck he is.”

“Oh, come on, everyone knows Luthor. He’s one of the first founding Meths.”

“What’s a Meth?”

“You’ve never heard of Meths?” Lance scoffed. “You’re dressed like one.”

“Like I said, I’m not from here.”

“ _And the days of Methuselah were nine hundred and sixty-nine years._ ” Lance quoted as the cruiser began to rise through the clouds. “It’s Luthor, he’s almost four centuries old.”  

 


	4. Chapter 4

 

From Iron Heights the transport had flown south, along the coast for no more than ten minutes before the steep climb in height, breaking through the clouds. By that time, the light through the windows had turned a warm gold with the sun’s brightness above the cloud layer.

The construct before them was beautiful.

Kara had never seen anything like it. Twisting into the sky, a hand reaching out to the stars themselves, somehow natural despite its obviously human origins. Shinning white in the light of the sun, it was truly magnificent, the construct almost reminiscent of bone in its smoothness and organic visage. Beyond the smog and cloud of the city below, it was reminiscent of the tales of Olympus, the home of the Gods.

“They call it the Aerium,” Lance provided, clearly sensing Kara’s intrigue. “Guess they don’t have this where you come from either, huh?”

As the cruiser continued the journey to the very top of the tower, Lance spoke again. “So, where you from? Home planet kinda thing?”

“Not here.” Kara spoke lowly, still fascinated by the Aerium.

“That’s pretty vague.” Lance grumbled.

“You ask a lot of questions.” Kara remarked evenly.

“You sound like my daughter,” Lance scoffed. “She always said I could find a way to talk to anybody.”

“Especially when they’re trapped in a car with you.” Kara snarked.

The transport sideslipped and banked, giving Kara a view of the Luthor estate, the topmost structure of the Aerium. It took up the entirety of the area, edging in from the furthest reach in neatly manufactured tones of green and gravel around a sprawling tile-roofed mansion big enough to house a small army. The walls were white, the roofing coral and the army, if there was one, was out of sight. Any security systems Luthor had installed were very low-key. As they moved lower, Kara made out the discreet haze of a power fence along one border of the grounds. Barely enough to distort the view from the house.

Nice.

Less than a dozen meters up over one of the immaculate lawns, Lance kicked in the landing brake with what seemed like unnecessary violence. The transport shuddered from end to end and they came down hard amidst flying clods of turf.

Kara shot Lance a reproachful look which he ignored. He threw open the hatch and climbed out. After a moment Kara joined him on the damaged lawn, prodding at the torn grass with the toe of one shoe.

“Really stuck that landing. You’re not a driver, are you?”

“I said I worked security.” Lance began, fixing a detectives shield to the belt of his suit pants. “I didn’t say for who.”

“So this hasn’t been a conversation, it’s been an interrogation.”

“Last chance,” Lance tried. “Just give me a name.”

Kara gritted her teeth for a moment before answering. “Kara Zor-El. Look me up.”

Stepping away from Lance, Kara moved towards the gravel path leading to the house. She had hardly made it ten paces before Lance was on her again.

“You can’t be,” He spoke sharply. “All the Legionnaires died.”

“All except one.”

The group of suits that had been moving towards them since the landing cam to a stop about ten meters away. There were three large men with automatic weapons slung over their shoulders. They had been standing under the eaves but had quickly made their way towards the transport the moment it touched down.

“Not another step, Lance.” The one at the front spoke, aiming a handgun in the detective’s direction.

“Oh, put your toy down, I’m SCPD and you know it, Corben.” Lance spoke sharply, ignoring the threats and stepping around Kara to walk towards them. “So, put them down and tell me where your boss is because I really would like a fucking word.”

A young woman appeared from the side of the house, tennis racket in hand, and moved across the lawn towards them. When she was no more than fifteen meters away, she stopped, tucked the tennis racket under one arm. From the slight widening of the eyes of one of the grunts, Kara guessed that they had called her on an internal mike.

Slick.

“Detective Lance.”

She was beautiful in a sun, sea and sand sort of way and the sports shorts and leotard she was wearing displayed the fact to maximal effect. Raven hair brushed her shoulders as she moved and there had been a hint of milk white teeth when she spoke. She wore sweat bands at forehead and wrists and from the dew on her brow they were not for show. There was a finely toned muscle in her legs and a substantial bicep stood out when she lifted her arm. Moderate breasts strained the fabric of the leotard, and Kara wondered if the body was hers.

“You’re trespassing on private property.”

Lance didn’t rise to the threatening tone in the young woman’s voice. “Go and fetch mummy and daddy, Lena.”

“Miss Luthor to you, detective.”

As the woman – Lena – stepped closer, she turned her attention to Kara.

“Kara Zor-El?” Her pronunciation was perfect.

“That’s me.” Kara spoke neutrally, ignoring the way the young woman seemed to be sizing her up like a piece of meat.

“You were supposed to be met at the storage facility.” It sounded like an accusation, Kara simply grinned.

“Well, I was.”

“Not by the police.” She turned back to Lance. “I assume it was you who arranged for our chauffeur to be pulled over on some trumped-up emissions charge.”

“No, _Miss Luthor_ , that would be Traffic Control,” Lance said politely. “I have no jurisdiction in that division.”

Lena sneered.

“Oh, I’m sure you haven’t, detective. And I’m sure none of your friends work there either.” The voice turned patronising. “My father will have him released before the sun goes down, you know.”

Kara glanced sideways to see Lance’s reaction, but there was none.

“You’re not welcome here, detective.” Lena spoke in a freezing voice.

“Yeah,” Lance rolled his eyes. “Well, there’s your new pet terrorist. Have a good evening, Miss Luthor.” Lance started walking back towards the transport. “You’re welcome.”

“The terrorist can hear you,” Kara remarked, arms crossed over her chest. “I’m standing right here.”

Lance rounded on her. “Yeah, good. ‘Cause we’re not done, you and me.”

Lance clapped her unexpectedly on the shoulder and headed back to the transport at an easy pace. Halfway there he suddenly stopped and turned back.

“Here. Almost forgot. You’ll need these.”

He dug in his breast pocket and tossed Kara a small packet. She caught it reflexively and looked down. Nicotine patches.

“Be seeing you.”

He swung himself aboard the transport and slammed the hatch. Through the glass, Kara saw him looking at her. The transport lifted on full repulse, pulverising the ground beneath and ripping a furrow across the lawn as it swung west. Kara watched it out of sight.

“Charming.” Lena spoke, mostly to herself.

“Miss Luthor?”

She swung around. The look on her face was one of intrigue and, if Kara wasn’t mistaken, a little bit of attraction, though it was largely masked by a visage of annoyance.

“My father sent a car for you, Miss Zor-El. Why didn’t you wait for it?”

“No one told me to wait for a car, I figured Lance there was my ride.”

Lena bit her tongue in annoyance, easily visible to any observer and muttered something about incompetence and prisons. She stood still facing Kara, flushed with annoyance, breasts rising and falling distractingly. When they stick a body in the tank, it goes on producing hormones pretty much the way it would if one were asleep. Kara became abruptly aware that she was incredibly aroused and did her best to not make her discomfort obvious.

“You should have waited.”

“Miss Luthor, if I’d waited, I’d still be there now. Can we go inside?”

Her eyes widened a little, and Kara suddenly saw in them how old she really was. Then she lowered her gaze and summoned composure. When she spoke again, her voice had softened.

“I’m sorry, Miss Zor-El. I’ve forgotten my manners. The police, as you can see, have not been sympathetic. But I am very sorry, I’m not usually like this. None of us are.” She gestured around as if to say the two armed guards would have been bearing garlands of flowers. “Please accept my apologies.”

“Of course.”

“So,” She began raising her hand. “I’m Lena Luthor.” Kara took the offered hand it and shook it gently. “Welcome to Suntouch House.”

_XXX_

The inside of the house was light and airy. A maid met them at the veranda and took Lena Luthor’s tennis racket for her without a word. They went down a marbled hallway hung with art that, to Kara’s untrained eye, looked old. Sketches of Gagarin and Armstrong, Empathist renderings of Erok-El and Shayera Hol. At the end of the gallery, set on a plinth, was something like a narrow tree made out of crumbling red stone, sprawling up and beyond the ceiling, and it’s sprouts glowing an ethereal blue. Kara paused in front of it and Miss Luthor had to backtrack from the right turn she was making.

“That should be in a museum.”

“I share my father’s weakness for Elder Civilisation artefacts.” Her face underwent a change that Kara caught in the corner of her eye. She was reassessing. Kara turned for a closer look at her face. “I collect them, among other things.”

“Is it alive?” Kara asked breathlessly, taking a step towards the tree.

“No one knows, this is the only Songspire tree on Earth.” There was a sudden enthusiasm in her tone that Kara liked her better for. “No one really knows what they are. They could have functioned as part of Elder Civilisation architecture. On Mars, they grew to be hundred of meters tall, sometimes as wide as this house at the root. You can hear them singing for kilometres. The perfume carries as well. From the erosion patterns, we think most of them are at least ten thousand years old. This one might have been around since the founding of the Roman Empire.”

“I know,” Kara whispered, hand reaching out to lightly stroke one of the blossoms of the tree. “I’ve seen them.”

“Argo, of course.” Lena answered tentatively.

“It must have cost a fortune to ship here.”

“Money wasn’t an object, Miss Zor-El.” The mask was back in place.

They made double time down the right-hand corridor, perhaps to make up for the unscheduled diversion. With each step Miss Luthor’s breasts jiggled under the thin material of the leotard and Kara took a morose interest in the art on the other side of the corridor. More Empathist work. Again, Shayera Hol with her slender hand resting on a thrusting phallus of a rocket.

 _Not much help_.

The lounge in which Lionel Luthor resided was built on the end of the house’s west wing. Miss Luthor led Kara right up to an unobtrusive wooden door and pressed it open for her, the sunlight bursting through the opening.

“Good luck, Miss Zor-El.”

Kara lifted a hand to shade her eyes and stepped through the door. There was an upper level to the lounge, and the wall to her immediate left was comprised largely of glass panes. The floor was the same marble of the corridor, the walls has a similar theme but were mostly comprised of mahogany bookcases, unlike the office of the warden back at Iron Heights there was no layer of dust on Lionel Luthor’s shelves. The sun was laying an even coat of orange light along their spines.

“Miss Zor-El.” A deep voice suddenly spoke.

Kara turned slowly, giving no sign of the shock she had felt on the sudden call. On the upper balcony was Luthor, looking down at her. There was a book in his hand, folded closed over his fingers.

“I apologise my driver was unable to pick you up, the police have been very…intrusive in my affairs of late.”

“That’s alright,” Kara began, keeping her eyes on the room around her, refusing to look up at Luthor. “The ride was very instructive.”

“Hmm. Yes, I’m sure it was. Details are, after all, a Legionnaire’s stock in trade.  Or were, I should say. ‘ _Immersion and total absorb_ ’. Wasn’t that the term? ‘ _Whatever answer you may seek, it is precisely where you are not looking._ ”

“You’ve read J’onzz.”

“I was alive during the Uprising, yes.”

“Yeah? So was I.”


	5. Chapter 5

 

Luthor looked like a Man Who Read. There was a favourite Photoplay star back on Krypton called Nim An-Dor, best known for his portrayal of a virile young Quellist philosopher who cut swathes through the brutal tyranny of the early settlement years. It was, Kara recalled her father telling her as a child, questionable in how accurate it’s portrayal of the Quellists was, but a good flick nonetheless. She had seen it herself once or twice. Luthor looked a lot like an older version of An-Dor in that role. He was slim and elegant with a full head of iron grey hair which he wore loosely in curls that reached his shoulders, and hard black eyes. The book in his hands and the shelves around him were like an utterly natural extension of the powerhouse of a mind that looked out from those eyes.

They looked at each other for a while as Kara tried to decide if she was angry at the man or not. She had been dragged halfway across the settled universe, dumped into a new body and thrown into a parole agreement it seemed she had no choice but to accept. Rich people tend to do that, she thought. They have the power and see no reason not to use it. Men and women are just merchandise, like everything else. Store them, freight them, decant them. Sign at the bottom please.

On the other hand, Kara considered, no one at Suntouch House was yet to mispronounce her name. Plus, she really didn’t have a choice. Whatever the job Luthor had in store for her was without a doubt one that no human on Earth was going to take willingly, but it still meant parole if she completed it, which was pretty substantial given that her sentence was functionally endless.

“It’s all in the distant past for me, you see,” Luthor began, following the path of the balcony towards the steps. “But for you, of course, it’s all rather different. There are very few of us now who saw first-hand what the Legion could do. And I must admit that I had a very begrudging admiration for you.” Luthor began to descend the steps that sat in front of the large glass window, finally on eye-level with Kara. “The most formidable fighting force in the galaxy.”

Space, to use a cliché, is big. The closest of the Settled Worlds is fifty lightyears from Earth. The most far flung is four times that distance, and some of the colony transports continued to strive out further. If some maniac started rattling tactical nukes, or some other biosphere-threatening toy, what are you going to do? You can transmit the information via hyperspatial needlecast so close to instantaneously that scientists are still arguing about the terminology, but that, to quote Quellcrist Falconer, deploys no bloody divisions. Even if you launched a troop carrier the moment shit hit the fan, the marines would be arriving in time to quiz the grandchildren of whoever won.

That’s no way to run a Protectorate.

So was born CTAC. The Colonial Tactical Assault Corps. Digitised and freighted minds of a crack combat team. Numbers hadn’t counted for much in war for a long time, to Kara’s knowledge most every military victory of the previous three centuries had been won by small, mobile guerrilla forces. They could decant the crack D.H.F. soldiers directly into sleeves with combat conditioning, jacked-up nervous systems and steroid built bodies, and shoot them up with reclamation drugs.

But even then, they’re in bodies they don’t know, on a world they don’t know, fighting for one bunch of total strangers against another bunch of total strangers over causes they’ve probably never even heard of and certainly don’t understand. The climate is different, the language and culture is different, the wildlife and vegetation is different, the atmosphere is different. Even the gravity. They know nothing, and even if they’re downloaded with implanted local knowledge, it would still be a massive amount of information to assimilate at a time when they’re likely to be fighting for their lives within hours of sleeving.

That’s where the Legion was developed. J’onn J’onzz had been tasked with creating a fighting force to replace CTAC, and he had almost done it before leading a mutiny and becoming the biggest pain in the Protectorate’s ass since Magrathea had crippled the galactic economy. Hyper-advanced neurachem that made CTAC look like children was an incredible first step, but it was still physical. CTAC had nothing that touched the pure mind, and it was the pure mind that was freighted. That was where the Legion started. J’onzz took psychospiritual techniques from a hundred different cultures and distilled them into a training system so complete that the Protectorate had pre-emptively forbidden any graduate of it from holding any political or military position.

They weren’t soldiers, not exactly.

“That would sound better if we hadn’t lost.”

“This,” Luthor came to a stop an arm’s reach away from her and held out the book. “Might interest you.”

When Kara reached out to take the book, she noticed it was with far less mechanical precision as she had taken the doctor’s card. Download dues. The leather-bound tome was familiar in her hands, and Kara’s movements were painfully delicate as she unwrapped the binder and opened the book.

“Oh, it might be all corneal streaming now,” Luthor began with a faint smile as Kara delicately observed that pages. “But there's something about the simplicity of holding the written word in your hand. The very heft of it. As men have done for countless of centuries before us. It is a tie to our shared past.”

She stopped turning the pages, her eyes resting on a flawless sketch of a Songspire tree.

“Where did you get this?”

“I bought it at auction,” Luthor answered. “Supposedly it is written by J’onzz himself in his own hand. Judging by your reaction, I’d say I got what I paid for.”

The smug grin on his face made something in Kara snap. “Listen to me,” She closed the book and fixed the binder as she spoke threateningly. “I spent this entire day getting well and truly fucked around with, so let me be painfully clear. Some things can’t be bought, like me. Now I didn’t ask you to bring me back into this world. In fact, I fought a war to stop people like you from happening.” Kara closed what little distance remained between her and Luthor. “So, if someone doesn’t tell me right now what the fuck this is all about…I might just lose my temper.” She finished by pressing the book against Luthor’s chest.

They stayed like that for a moment, Kara staring Luthor straight in the eye. So close as they were, Kara could see the age in Lionel Luthor, behind the eyes was a man wholly too old for his body. A man, quite evidently, who wasn’t used to people standing against him the way that Kara did.

“Understood,” Luthor hummed lowly, taking the book from Kara and placing it down on the granite table that filled much of the room space. Placing the book down carefully Luthor indicated to a hardcopy document that sat upon the table. “Now this, is a full pardon, signed by the president of The Protectorate.”

“No one had that kind of power.”

“Power,” Luthor began with a smirk. “Is a matter of influence, Miss Zor-El. And I have had a great deal of influence at the U.N. If you agree to my terms, your sentence will be reduced to time served. And then I will open up a very generous line of credit in your name. DNA trace accessible. And finally, when the investigation is over, I will pay you a salary of fifty million U.N. credits, that’s a fortune. You can go anywhere, choose any life. All I ask, is that you solve a murder.”

Luthor began walking towards a desk.

“Whose?”

Without a word, Luthor pulled a white cloth from the wall, revealing the damage behind it. “Mine.”

The desk was a heavy mirrorwood item – Luthor must have freighted the gene code in from Krypton and cultivated the tree on Earth. That struck Kara as almost as extravagant as the Songspire in the hall, and in slightly more questionable taste. Back on Krypton mirrorwood grew in forests on three continents, and practically every dive from Vathlo to Kryptonopolis had a bar top carved out of the stuff. Kara moved closer to inspect the stucco wall. The white surface was furrowed and seared black with the unmistakable signature of a beam weapon, and the dull rust of dried blood was seeped into the gash and trickled down the wall. The burn started at head height and followed a short arc downwards.

Kara would reluctantly admit that she was intrigued at the very least.

 “So…Miss Zor-El, where would you like to begin?” Luthor smirked, clearly reading her interest.

 “Who found your body?”

“My daughter, Naomi.

He broke off as someone opened the door. A moment later, the maid who had attended Lena Luthor walked into the room bearing a tray with a decanter of amber liquid and glasses. Luthor was wired with an internal microphone, like everyone else at Suntouch House Kara noted.

The maid set down her tray on the desk, poured with a machine-like precision and then withdrew on a short nod from Luthor. Kara opted to ignore the glass that had been poured for her. The shakiness associated with downloading was beginning to assert itself on her, and in addition Kara had noticed an unwelcome scratchiness in her feet and fingers which she assumed was nicotine dependency. Alcohol on top of everything else would finish her. Luthor continued to stare after the maid blankly for a while.

Back from the dead, it really was no joke.

“Naomi?” Kara prompted him gently. 

He blinked. “Oh. Yes. She barged in here, wanting something. Probably the keys to one of the limos. I’m an indulgent father, I suppose, and Naomi is my youngest.”

“How old?”

“Twenty-three.”

“Do you have many children?”

“Yes, I do.” Luthor smiled faintly. “When you have leisure and wealth, bringing children into the world is a pure joy. I have twenty-seven sons and thirty-four daughters.”

“Do they live with you?”

“Naomi does, as does Lena, most of the time. The others come and go. Most have families of their own now.”

“How is Naomi?” Kara stepped her tone down a little.

“She’s in psychosurgery,” said Luthor shortly. “She’ll pull through, my godson Oliver had her rushed into hospital.” At Kara’s questioning look Luthor continued. “He happened upon…the situation…not long after Naomi, he was delivering some business documents on behalf of his father. Do you need to speak to them?”

“Not at the moment.” Kara looked back up to the gouge in the wall thoughtfully. “It was an energy weapon?”

“Yes. A particle blaster.”

“This is the only sign of gunfire in the room?”

“Yes”.

“Nothing else was damaged, broken, or disturbed in any way?”

“No, nothing.” From the look on his face Kara could tell Luthor wanted to say more, but he was keeping quiet.

“Do you own a weapon that would do this?”

“Yes, it was mine. I keep it for personal protection in a safe under the desk. Handprint coded. They found the safe open, nothing else was removed. Do you need to see inside it?”

“Not at the moment, thank you.” Kara knew from experience how difficult mirrowood furniture was to move. She turned up one corner of the woven rug under the desk. There was an almost invisible seam in the floor beneath. “Whose prints will open this?”

“Mine and Lillian’s, my wife.”


	6. Chapter 6

There was a significant pause. Luthor sighed, loud enough it echoed a little in the room. “Go ahead, say it. Everyone else has. Either I committed suicide, or my wife murdered me. There’s just no other explanation. I’ve been hearing it since they pulled me out of the tank.”

Kara looked elaborately around the room before meeting his eyes.

“Well you must admit that it makes for easier police work. Nice and neat.” Kara said. “But you’re still here, meaning your stack is still intact, so you must remember what happened.”

Luthor hummed. “No, it was completely destroyed I’m afraid. RDed as they say.”

“You’ve got remote storage.” Kara deadpanned. “How regular is the update?”

Luthor smiled. “Every forty-eight hours.” He tapped the back of his neck. “Direct needlecast from here into a shielded stack over at the PsychaSec installation in Orchid Bay. I don’t even have to think about it.”

“And they keep your clones on ice there as well.”

“Yes. Multiple units.”

Guaranteed immortality. Kara paused in her questioning for a while, thinking on it. Wondering how she would like it. Wondering _if_ she would like it.

“Must be expensive.” She said at last.

“Not really. I own PsychaSec.” At Kara’s continued silence Luthor continued. “So, you see, Miss Zor-El, neither I nor my wife could have pulled the trigger. We both knew it wouldn’t be enough to kill me. No matter how unlikely it seems, it had to be a stranger. Someone who didn’t know about the backup.”

Kara nodded. “Alright, who else did know about it? Let’s narrow the field.”

“Apart from my family?” Luthor shrugged. “My lawyer, a few of her legal aides, and the director at PsychaSec.”

“So how did the police explain it?”

“They claimed that suicide is rarely a rational act. They used it to explain all the other minor inconveniences in their theory as well.”

“Which were?”

That had been what Luthor wanted to reveal earlier. It came out in a rush. “Which were that I should choose to walk the last kilometre home, and let myself into the grounds on foot, then apparently readjust my internal clock before I killed myself.”

Kara blinked. “I’m sorry?”

“The police found traces of a cruiser landing on the lawns at the perimeter of Suntouch House, which conveniently enough is in a blind spot for the house security surveillance. A mistake that has now been rectified I assure you. Equally conveniently, there was no satellite cover overhead at that precise time.”

“Did they check taxi data stacks?”

Luthor nodded. “For what it’s worth they did, yes. West Coast law does not require taxi companies to keep a record of their fleets’ whereabouts at any given time. Some of the more reputable firms do, of course, but there are others that don’t. Some even make a selling point of it. Client confidentiality, that sort of thing.” A momentary hunted look crossed Luthor’s face. “For some clients, in some cases, that would be a distinct advantage.”

“Have you used these firms in the past?”

“On occasion, yes.”

The logical next question hung in the air between them. Kara left it unasked and waited. If Luthor wasn’t willing to share his reasons for wanting confidential transport, Kara reasoned, then she wasn’t going to press him until she had more landmarks locked down.

Luthor cleared his throat. “There is, in any case, some evidence to suggest that the vehicle in question might not have been a taxi. Field effect distribution, the police say, is in keeping with a larger vehicle.”

“That depends how hard it landed.”

“I know. In any case, my tracks lead from the landing site, and apparently the condition of my shoes was in keeping with a kilometre’s trek across the lawns. And then, finally, there was a call placed from this room shortly after three a.m. the night I was killed. A time check. There’s no voice on the line, only the sound of someone breathing.”

“And the police know this too?”

“Of course they do.”

“How do they explain it?”

Luthor smiled thinly. “They didn’t. They thought the solitary walk through the rain was very much in keeping with the act of suicide, and apparently they couldn’t see any inconsistency in a man wanting to check his own internal chronochip before he blows his own head off. As they say, suicide is rarely a rational act. They have case histories of this sort of thing. Apparently, the world is full of incompetents who kill themselves and wake up in a new sleeve the next day. I’ve had it explained to me. They forget they’re wearing a stack, or it doesn’t seem important in the moment. Our beloved medical welfare system brings them right back, suicide notes and requests notwithstanding. Curious abuse of rights. I gather the system is similar on Krypton?”

Kara shrugged. “More or less. If the request is legally witnessed, then they have to let them go. Otherwise, failure to revive is a storage offence. Stops murderers passing their work off as suicide.”

Luthor stepped towards the blonde and locked gazes with her. “Miss Zor-El, I am three hundred and sixty-five years old. I have lived through a corporate war, the subsequent collapse of my industrial and trading interests, the Uprising, the real deaths of two of my children, at least three major economic crises, and I am still here. I am not the kind of man to take my own life, and even if I were, I would not have bungled it in such a fashion. If it had been my intention to die, you would not be talking to me now. Is that clear?”

Kara looked back at him, into those dark hard eyes. “Yes, very.”

“Excellent.”

Luthor turned then, walking back up the stairs that sat behind the desk at either side. There was a small balcony that separated the ground floor of the longue to its upper level, resting against the large wall-sized window. Seemingly with no other choice, Kara grudgingly followed him. Luthor continued a few more paces and Kara observed the various details. An antique telescope, various maps and charts, all bathed in the burnt orange light of sunset.

As Kara followed him she caught the telescope with her arm, knocking the barrel upright. The download shakes were beginning to demand their dues. The telescope’s positional motor whined crabbily and returned the instrument to its original shallow angle. Elevation and range focus ticked over on the ancient digital memory display. Kara paused to watch the thing realign itself. The finger marks on the keypad were smudged in years of dust.

Luthor had either not noticed her ineptitude or was being polite about it.

“Yours?” Kara asked, pointing loosely to the instrument.

He glanced at it absently. “Once. It was an enthusiasm I had. Back when the stars were still something to stare at. You wouldn’t remember how that felt.” It was said without conscious pretention or arrogance, almost inconsequentially. His voice lost some of its focus, like a transmission fading out. “Last time I looked through that lens was nearly three centuries ago. A lot of the colony ships were still in flight then. We were still waiting to find out if they’d make it. Waiting for the needlebeams to come back to us. Like lighthouse beacons.”

As Luthor looked out to the sunset in what could easily have been mislabelled as reverie, Kara began to mull the situation over. Luthor believed himself above everyone around him. Age certainly might have led to a vast array of knowledge, but in the case of Lionel Luthor it didn’t seem to herald wisdom. Quentin Lance’s attitude was beginning to make sense to her. If Luthor thought he was outside the normal requirements of good citizenship, he wasn’t likely to make many friends in uniform. When you don’t like the laws, you go someplace they can’t touch you.

And then you make up some of your own.

“What’s the last thing you remember?”

“Tuesday 14th August.” He said promptly. “Going to bed at around midnight.”

“That was the last remote update.”

“Yes, the neddlecast would have gone through at around four in the morning, but obviously I was asleep by then.”

“So almost a full forty-eight hours before your death.”

Optimally bad, Kara thought. Most anything can happen in forty-eight hours. Luthor could have been to the moon and back in that time.

“And there’s nothing from before that time that could suggest to you why someone might want to kill you?”

Luthor was still looking out the window, but Kara saw how he smiled.

“Did I say something amusing?”

He had the grace to turn back to her.

“No, Miss Zor-El. There is nothing amusing about this situation. Someone out there wants me dead, and that’s not a comforting thought. But you must understand that for a man in my position enmity and even death threats are part and parcel of everyday existence. People envy me, people hate me, and yes, some people want me dead. It is the price of success.”

Kara scoffed, that was news to her. There were people that hated her on a dozen different worlds, and people who wanted her dead on a dozen more, though she had never considered herself a successful woman.

“Had any interesting ones lately? Death threats, I mean.”

He shrugged. “Perhaps, I don’t make a habit of screening them. My lawyer and security team handle that for me.”

“You don’t’ consider death threats worth your attention?”

“Miss Zor-El, I am an entrepreneur. Opportunities arise, crises present themselves, and I deal with them. Life goes on. I hire managers to deal with that.”

“I’ll need to see them anyway.” The thought of scrolling through hundreds of meters of incoherent vitriol from the lost and losers of an antique world was sufficient enough to make Kara feel significantly weary, but she couldn’t afford to miss anything. A profound lack of interest in Luthor’s problems washed through her. Kara masked it with an effort worthy of the approval of J’onn J’onzz.

“I’ll have it sorted.” Luthor’s eyes took on the inward glaze of a someone consulting internal hardware. “Anything else?”

“I need a place to stay back in the city. Somewhere quiet, mid-range.”

“Yes, there are plenty of places like that. I’ll have Corben ferry you back there.” Luthor paused again, summoning yet another minor on his internal microphone if Kara was to hazard a guess. “I take it you intend to interview Lillian now? She really knows more than me about those last forty-eight hours than I do, so you’ll want to speak to her quite closely.”

“Oh yes,” Kara said unenthusiastically. “I’d like to do that.”


	7. Chapter 7

 

“You seem ill at ease, Miss Zor-El. Are you?”

Kara looked Lillian Luthor up and down, analysing the woman who stood before her. She couldn’t help but to be reminded of Lena, their bodies were about the same age.

“No.” Kara said, more coarsely than she had intended.

Lillian curved her mouth down at the corners and went back to rolling up the map she’d been studying when Kara had arrived. Behind her, the maid who had shown her in pulled the chart room door shut with a heavy click. Luthor hadn’t seen fit to accompany her to the presence of his wife. Instead, the maid had appeared as if by magic as they had headed out of the lounge. Luthor paid her about as much attention as he had the first time. When Kara had left, he had still been standing at the mirrorwood desk, staring at the blast mark on the wall.

Mrs Luthor deftly tightened the roll on the map in her hands and began to slide it into a long protective tube.

“Well,” She said without looking up. “Ask me your questions then.”

“Where were you when your husband was killed”?

“I was in bed,” She looked up at Kara that time. “Please don’t ask me to corroborate that, I was alone.”

The chart room was long and airy under and arched roof that someone had tiled with illuminum. The map racks were waist high, each topped with a glassed-in display and set out in rows like exhibit cases in a museum. Kara moved out of the centre aisle, putting one of the racks between Mrs Luthor and herself. Kara almost felt like she was taking cover.

“Mrs Luthor, you seem to be under some misapprehension here. I’m not the police. I’m interested in information, not guilt.”

She slid the wrapped map into its holder and leaned back against the rack with both hands behind her. She was immaculately fastened up in black slacks and something born of a union between a dinner jacket and a bodice. Her sleeves were pushed casually up almost to her elbow, her wrists adorned with jewellery.

“Do I sound guilty, Miss Zor-El?” She asked.

“You seem overanxious to assert your fidelity to a complete stranger.”

She laughed. It was a dissonant, throaty sound and her shoulders rose and fell as she let it out.

“How very indirect you are.”

Kara looked down at the map displayed on the top of the rack in front of her. It was dated in the top left-hand corner, a year four centuries before she was even born. The names marked on it were in a script she couldn’t read.

“Where I come from, directness is not considered a great virtue, Mrs Luthor.”

“No? Then what is?”

Kara shrugged. “Politeness. Control. Avoidance of embarrassment for all parties.”

“Sounds boring. I think you’re going to have a few shocks here, Miss Zor-El.”

“I didn’t say I was a good citizen where I come from, Mrs Luthor.”

“Oh,” She pushed herself off the rack and moved towards Kara. “Yes, Lionel told me a little about you. It seems you’re thought of as a dangerous woman on Krypton, and a dozen other planets to that matter.”

Kara simply shrugged again, and Mrs Luthor regarded her with a disapproving glare.

“It’s Russian.”

“I’m sorry?”

“The script.” She came around the rack and stood beside Kara, looking down at the map. “This is a Russian computer-generated chart of the moon landing sites. Very rare. I got it at an auction. While my husband and daughter might like to obsess over the so-called achievements of aliens I prefer the conquests of humans. Do you like it?”

“It’s very nice.” Kara commented dismissively. “What time did you go to sleep the night your husband died?”

Mrs Luthor stared at her. “Early. I told you, I was alone.” She forced the edge out of her voice and her tone became almost light again. “Oh, and if that sounds like guilt, Miss Zor-El, it is not. It’s resignation. With a twist of bitterness.”

“You feel bitter towards your husband?”

She smiled. “I thought it said resigned.”

“You said both.”

“Are you saying you think I killed my husband?”

“I don’t think anything yet, but it is a possibility.”

“Is it?”

“You had access to the safe. You were inside the house defences when it happened. And now it sounds as if you might have some emotional motives.”

Still smiling, she said. “Building a case, are we, Miss Zor-El?”

Kara looked back at her. “If the heart pumps. Yeah.”

“The police had a similar theory for a while. They decide the heart didn’t pump.”

She somehow managed to make it sound as though only a complete moron would have thought as much. Kara could feel her grip on the interview sliding out of sight.

“What made the police…”

“Ask them.” She turned her back and walked away from Kara as if making a decision. “How old are you, Miss Zor-El?”

“Subjectively? Thirty. The years on Krypton are a little longer than here, but there isn’t much in it.”

“And objectively?” She asked, mocking Kara’s tone.

“I’ve had about two centuries in the tank, including my latest stay. You tend to lose track.” It was a lie. Kara knew to the day how long each of her terms in storage had been. She had worked it out one particularly lonely night after the fall of the Legion, and the number wouldn’t go away.

“How alone you must be by now.”

Kara sighed and turned back to examine the nearest map rack. Each rolled chart was labelled at the end. The notation was archaeological. _Syrtis Minor, 3 rd excavation, east quarter_. _Bradbury; aboriginal ruins._ Kara started to tug one of the rolls free.

“Mrs Luthor, how I feel is not at issue here. Can you think of any reason why your husband might have tried to kill himself?”

She whirled on Kara almost before she had finished speaking, and her face was tight with anger.

“My husband did not kill himself.” She said freezingly.

“You seem very sure of that.” Kara looked up from the map and gave her a smug smile. “For someone who wasn’t awake, I mean.”

“Put that back,” She cried, staring back towards Kara. “You have no idea how valuable…”

She stopped, brought up short as Kara slid the map back into the tack. She swallowed and brought the flush in her cheeks under control.

“Are you trying to make me angry, Miss Zor-El?”

“I’m just trying to get your attention.” 

They looked at each other for a pair of seconds. Mrs Luthor lowered her gaze.

“I’ve told you, I was asleep when it happened. What else can I tell you?”

“Where had your husband gone that night?”

She bit her lip. “I’m not sure. He went to Osaka for a meeting that day, for a meeting.”

“Osaka is where?”

She looked at Kara in surprise.

“I’m not from here.” Kara said impatiently.

“Osaka is in Japan. I thought…”

“Yeah. Krypton was settled by Japanese and European colony ships. It was a long time ago, and I wasn’t around.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. You probably don’t know much about what your ancestors were doing three centuries ago either. 

Kara stopped. Mrs Luthor was looking at her strangely. Her own words caught up to her a moment later. Download dues. Kara knew she was going to have to sleep soon, before she said or did something stupid.

“I am over three centuries old, Miss Zor-El.” There was a small smile playing around her mouth as she said it. She’d taken back the advantage as smoothly as any politician or negotiator that Kara had ever seen. “Appearances are deceptive, as I’m sure you know. This is my eleventh body.”

The way that she held herself said that Kara was supposed to take a look. She flicked her gaze across the Slavic boned cheeks, down to the décolletage and then to the tilt of her hips, the half-shrouded lines of her thighs, all the while affecting a detachment that was clearly wasn’t the reaction Lillian Luthor had been hoping for.

“It’s very nice. A little young for my tastes, but as I said, I’m not from here. Can we get back to your husband please? He’d been to Osaka during the day, but he came back. Where did he could after that?”

“I don’t know, I’m not his keeper, Miss Zor-El.”

Kara could tell her interview was going nowhere fast.

“Perhaps I’d better speak to him about it.” Kara looked around the room. “All these maps, how long have you been collecting?”

Mrs Luthor must have sensed that the interview was drawing to a close, Kara could practically see the tension puddle out of her like oil.

“Most of my life. While Lionel was staring at the stars, some of us kept our eyes on the ground.”

Kara thought of the telescope abandoned on Luthor’s sundeck. She saw it stranded in angular silhouette against the evening sky, a mute testimony to times and observations past and a relic no one wanted. Kara remembered the way it had wheezed itself back into alignment after she jarred it, faithful to programming maybe centuries old, briefly awakened the way Kara had stroked the Songspire awake in the hall.

_Old._

With a sudden and suffocating pressure, it was all around her, the reek of it pouring off the stones of Suntouch House like damp. Age. Kara even caught the waft of it from the impossibly young woman in front of her and her throat locked up with a tiny click. Something in her wanted to run, to get out and breath fresh, new air, to be away from those creatures whose memory stretched back beyond even historical events she had been taught in school.

“Are you alright, Miss Zor-El?”

Download dues.

Kara focused with an effort. “Yes, I’m fine.” Kara cleared her throat and looked into her eyes. “Well, I won’t keep you any longer, Mrs Luthor. Thank you for your time. I’ll see myself out.”

The walk out of the chart room seemed to take forever, and Kara’s footsteps had developed a sudden echo inside her skull. With every step, and with every displayed map that she passed she felt those ancient eyes on her spine, watching.

Kara muttered to herself.

“I really need a cigarette.”


	8. Chapter 8

The sky had turned the texture of old silver and the lights were clicking to life all across Starling City by the time the Luthor’s chauffer had returned Kara to the town. The car spiralled down from the Aerium over an ancient suspension bridge the colour of rust, and in amongst the heaped-up buildings of a peninsula hill at more reasonable speed. Corben, the chauffer, was a muscular middle-aged man, whose sharply defined looks lent themselves well to brooding. He had mostly refused to speak to Kara during the journey, seeming to hold some vague, unfounded grude that she couldn’t quite place.

She didn’t complain. Kara’s own mood wasn’t far off matching the chauffeur’s. Images of Jimmy’s death kept creeping into her mind. It had only happened last night. Subjectively.

The transport braked in the sky over a wide thoroughfare, sharply enough for someone above them to broadcast an outraged proximity squawk into the limousine’s comset. Corben cut off the signal with a slap of one hand across the console and his face tilted up to glower dangerously thought the roof window. They settled down into the flow of ground traffic with a slight bump and immediately made a left into a narrower street. Kara started to take an interest in what was outside.

There was, Kara noted, a sameness to street life. On every world she’d ever been to, the same underlying patterns played out, flaunt and vaunt, buy and sell, like some distilled essense of human behaviour seeping out from under whatever clanking political machine had been dropped on it from above. Starling City, Earth, the most ancient of the civilised worlds, had won itself no exemptions. From the massive insubstantial holofronts along the antique buildings to the street traders with their catalogue broadcast sets nestling on shoulders like clumsy mechanical hawks or outsize tumours, everyone was selling something. Cars pulled in and out from the kerbside and supple bodies braced against them, leaning in to negotiate the way they had probably been doing since there had been cars for them to do it against. Shreds of steam and smoke drifted from food barrows. The limo was sound – and broadcast – proofed, but Kara could sense the noises through the glass, corner-pitch sales chants and modulated music carrying consumer-urge subsonics.

In the Legion, they reversed humanity. The sameness becomes apparent first, the underlying resonance that lets one get a handle on where they are, then the difference can be built up from the details.

The ethnic mix on Krypton had been primary European and Japanese, although any tank-grown variant was available…for a price. On Earth, every face was a different cast and colour – Kara saw tall, angular boned Africans, Mongols, pasty-skinned Nordics and, once, a man who looked like Mon-El, but she had lost him in the crowd. They all slid by like natives on the banks of a river.

Clumsy.

The impression skipped and flickered across her thoughts like the man in the crowd. Kara frowned and caught at it.

On Krypton, street life had a stripped back elegance to it, an economy of motion and gesture that felt almost like it had been choreograph if one wasn’t used to it. Kara had grown up in it, so the effect hardly registered until it wasn’t there anymore.

Kara wasn’t seeing it on Earth. The ebb and flow of human commerce beyond the limo’s windows had a quality like choppy water in the space between boats. People pushed and shoved their way along, backing up abruptly to get around tighter knots in the crowd that they apparently hadn’t noticed until it was too late to manoeuvre. Obvious tensions broke out, necks craned, muscled bodies drew themselves up. Twice Kara saw the making of a fight take stumbling shape, only to be swept away on the chop. It was as if the whole place had been sprayed with some pheromonal irritant.

Despite all that, Kara could feel something else. Gnawing away at the edge of her senses. A danger that she couldn’t place, the feeling of a set of eyes that she couldn’t see watching her.

“Corben,” Kara glanced sideways at his impassive profile. “You wanna cut the broadcast block for a minute?”

He looked across at Kara with a slight curl of the lip. “Sure.”

Kara settled back in the seat and fixed her gaze on the street again. “I’m not a tourist, Corben. This is what I do.”

The street sellers’ catalogue flooded aboard the limo like a swarm of delirium-induced hallucinations, slightly diffuse through lack of directed broadcast and blurring swiftly into each other as the limo glided along, but still a sensory overload y any Kryptonians standard. The pimps were the most obvious; a succession of oral and anal acts, digitally retouched to lend an airbrushed sheen to breasts and musculature. Each whore’s name was murmured in throaty voiceover, along with a superimposed facial; coy little girls, dominatrixes, stubbled stallions and a few from cultural stock that was completely alien to Kara. Weaving in between were the more subtle chemical lists and surreal scenarios of the drug and implant traders. Kara caught a couple of religious broadcasts amidst it all, images of spiritual calm among mountains, but they were liked drowning men in the sea of product.

The stumbling started to make more sense.

“What does from the Houses mean?” Kara asked Corben, picking up on the phrase from the broadcasts.

Corben sneered. “The mark of quality. The Houses are a cartel; high-class, expensive whorehouses. Get you anything you want, they say. If a girl’s from the Houses, she’s been taught to do stuff most people only ever dream about.” He nodded at the street. “Don’t kid yourself, no one out there ever worked at the Houses.”

Kara hummed in response, picking up yet another ad for the experience of the Houses. “You can turn the screen off now.”

The soft brush of images cut out abruptly, leaving the inside of Kara’s head feeling stark, like an unfurnished room. She waited for the feeling to fade and, like most after-effects, it did.

“This is Mission Street,” Corben announced. “The next few blocks are all hotels. Want me to drop you here?”

“You recommend anywhere?”

“Depends what you want.”

Kara gave him one of his own shrugs back. “Light. Space. Room service.”

He squinted thoughtfully. “Try the Hendrix, if you like. They got a tower annexe, and the whores they use are clean.”

The limousine picked up speed fractionally and they travelled a few more blocks in silence. Kara neglected to explain that she hadn’t meant _that_ kind of room service, but she let Corben draw the conclusions he seemed to want to.

Unbidden, a freeze frame of Lena Luthor’s sweat-dewed cleavage bounced through her mind.

The limo coasted to a halt outside a well-lit façade in a style Kara didn’t recognise. She climbed out and stared up at a huge holocast black man, features screwed up presumably in ecstasy at the music he was wringing left-handed from a white guitar. The image had the slightly artificial edges of a remastered two-dimensional image, which made it look old. Kara thanked Corben, slammed the door and watched the limousine cruise away. It began to climb almost immediately and after a moment Kara lost the tail lights in the streams of airborne traffic. She turned away from the mirrored glass doors of The Hendrix, and pushed on down the street.


End file.
